ECS GeForce GTX 460 Black Video Card Review

The GTX 460 Black video card from ECS is another product that comes with the high performance Arctic Cooling Accelero Turbo Pro cooler, it's also overclocked from the factory. Its performances are very close to the previously reviewed Calibre X460G and the fan speeds are much lower than the ones from the Sparkle model.

Features, Specifications

Features:

Specifications:

The mid-range GTX 460 is another Fermi GPU from Nvidia; the GPU is redesigned compared to the older 480, 470 or 465 GTX cards, so now we are dealing with a smaller chip, which is implicitly less complicated to manufacture, would get better yields and it also dissipates less heat.

After the cards were launched, we could see two versions entering the market, a cheaper one with 768MB and another with 1024MB. The ECS GTX 460 Black is lower clocked compared to the previously tested Calibre X460G:

GT104 Block Diagram

Compared with the GF100, the GF104 has only 2 Graphics processing clusters (instead of 4); this traduces in a number of shader multiprocessors cut to a total of eight. Also, the GF104 has only half number of raster and poly-morph engines compared to the GF100.

The memory controllers have also been reduced, from six to two.

However, if we look with more attention on the representation of a SM unit, we can count a total of 48 CUDA cores, opposed to 32 that were in the GF100.

The number of texture units in the SM have been doubled to eight and this gives the GF104 faster texturing capabilities.